Anti-communism as bad faith

One of the advantages of being old is that you get the sense of perspective that comes with having seen things before. So it is with the attacks on Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani for their support for communism.

I’m old enough to remember anti-communists in the 70s and 80s. Which means I remember just how much crass bad faith and hypocrisy they contained. Some of this bad faith was clear at the time, some is more evident with hindsight. Here are seven examples of what I mean:

 - They attacked the Soviet Union for its denial of freedoms. But many of them opposed gay rights and “women’s lib”, supported Pinochet and apartheid and to this day are relaxed about coercion within the workplace. The freedom many of them value is the freedom to oppress and dominate others.

 - They criticized Marxism for having a crude conception of historical inevitability: Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay on the subject. But they claimed that the Gulags were an inevitable result of Marxism.

 - They apply a double standard. Whereas they claim that oppression is an inseparable element of communism, they regard slavery and imperialism as mere accidental features of capitalism. I’m not sure this position is rescued by the fact that capitalism has thrived after the ending of imperialism and slavery. In many cases, imperialism was ended by armed struggle, not by enlightened capitalists realizing it wasn’t in their interests.

 - When I was a young idealistic socialist I was told – again by people channelling Berlin – that it was impossible to achieve utopia because there are inescapable trade-offs between fundamental values such as equality and liberty. Some of those same people, however, are now blind to the trade-off Brexit reveals between sovereignty and  prosperity: a meaningful free trade deal requires regulatory alignment, but this entails adopting some of other countries’ regulations, which is a loss of sovereignty.

 - Again, when I was young, cynical old anti-communists told me that it was impossible to build a substantially better society because the crooked timber of humanity lacked the rationality and knowledge to do so. As Tim Worstall recently said, grand plans don’t work. Oddly, though, such scepticism about state capacity disappeared with Brexit: untangling 40 years of intertwined laws, we were told, would be simple.

 - One example cold warriors gave of communism being the enemy of freedom was its attitude to migration: dissidents such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were for years banned from leaving the USSR. These people are not so keen on free movement today, however. Many of those who cheered when Reagan said “tear down this wall” also cheered when Trump proposed building one.

 - When they spoke of the Soviet Union, cold warriors claimed that centrally planned economies were a lousy idea. But centrally planned economies are still with us: bosses claim to be able to manage large complex organizations from the top down. Cold warriors are relaxed about this. They’re blind to the fact that if you want a modern example of a Stalinist you should look not among lefties but at men like Fred Goodwin or Philip Green. It’s not good enough to reply here that it someone doesn’t like their employer they can leave. None of us could escape the financial crisis, which was due at least in part to the failure of capitalist Stalinism.

Now, I do not say all this to defend Soviet Communism: it was an abomination. Nor do I decry those east European dissidents who paid a heavy price defending it. Western anti-communists, however, paid no such price. Quite the opposite.  For them, anti-communism was and still is a very comfortable part of a defence of inequality in the west. In this sense, we can charge them with another double standard – a very partial reading of Adam Smith. Whilst they are keen to stress the virtues of the invisible hand, they are less keen to heed Smith’s warning that we tend to be too deferential to the rich and powerful:

We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent…The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness. (Section 3 Ch III)

Subsequent work – on the status quo bias, just world illusion and system justification (pdf) – has vindicated Smith here. Not that you’d know it from defenders of capitalism.

Granted, Ash’s idea of communism needs a lot of work. But if I had to choose between her youthful idealism for a better world on the one hand, and smug defenders of an unjust and inefficient existing order on the other, I’ll choose Ash every time. As the woman who inspired my blog’s name sang, “teenagers, kick our butts.”

Comments

[Kevin Amos Carson]

I would add that Marxism's crude theory of historical inevitability is arguably an outlier in the work of Marx himself, mainly represented in one paragraph of the Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, and can be countered with tons of passages on the consciousness and self-activity of the working class as the subject actively engaged in building a successor system. The mechanistic vulgarity lies primarily in the official "Marxism" formulated by Engels in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature, and the incredibly crude diamat of Stalin's official "Leninism" developed after Lenin's death. And Althusser, of course.

[Kevin Amos Carson]

Re the significance of capitalism thriving after the abolition of slavery and imperialism, it's important to remember that imperialism never ended -- it was just superseded by neo-colonialism, with post-colonial states undertaking the previous policing functions of empire at their own expense while Western capital continued to own much of the looted and enclosed resource base and use multilaterally enforced neoliberalism and intellectual property as a legal framework to continue to export surplus capital and extract profits.

And the West abolished slavery and repealed the Corn Laws, etc., when the dominant faction of capital decided they had served their purpose and no longer suited their needs. But they continued to sit on the accumulated loot from previous centuries of colonialism and slavery, and collect enormous rents from it, even after formally abolishing it. It basically amounted to stealing everything there was to be stolen and then saying "OK no more stealing, starting... NOW!!!"

[G]

Were the east european dissident's not defeating it?

[Calgacus]

"When I was a young idealistic socialist I was told – again by people channelling Berlin – that it was impossible to achieve utopia because there are inescapable trade-offs between fundamental values such as equality and liberty. Some of those same people, however, are now blind to the trade-off Brexit reveals between sovereignty and prosperity:"

Again, the logic here is very faulty.

Just Saying "there are inescapable trade-offs between ... equality & liberty" or Just Saying there is a Brexit "trade-off ... between sovereignty and prosperity"

Does. Not. Make. Those. Statements. True.

They might be true in some situation. But they might not be. It is a matter requiring judgment.

Conceivably there is such a Brexit trade-off. But there might not be. It is beyond serious question that there is no sovereignty/prosperity trade-off between a country exiting the EuroZONE.

The Euro is so badly designed that one can safely say that if you took the most prosperous and well-run countries in the world - say Switzerland or Denmark - and ran them according to the crackpot Euro rules - that there would be widespread economic misery and massive strife in a generation.

Exiting the EU, regaining more sovereignty - whether that makes the UK more or less prosperous - is a real question. If so, is the trade-off [that only exists if "less" is the answer] worth it - is another real question.

Avoiding these questions is not thinking seriously about Brexit.

[Emma]

>> They attacked the Soviet Union for its denial of freedoms. But many of them opposed gay rights and “women’s lib”, supported Pinochet and apartheid and to this day are relaxed about coercion within the workplace. The freedom many of them value is the freedom to oppress and dominate others.

The most. Free, unfettered speech is only for bigots, who snivel like spoiled toddlers and invoke the specter of the gulag when the paying customers at for-profit institutions of higher learning (to whose taste they should rationally defer) refuse to let them on the property to air out their moldering list of unwanted opinions.

The rest of it, I’ll have take your word for.
It sounds reasonable.

[Hans]

This piece is absolutely horrendous and
hogwash in its entirety.

I can see why there is no author's name
penned to this Obamanation of an article.

[rogerh]

Interesting thought, how do you run a communist society.

I think there is a difficulty at the core of the idea, however exploitative and deceptive capitalism actually is, the capitalist approach aligns with the natural self interest and selfishness of most people. This natural self interest and selfishness may arise from the way we are born and raised in family groups and tribes or it may be innate.

So it seems natural to think of political and economic development arising from family and tribal groups via war lords and kings to empires and nation states. All held together by some kind of selfish self interest and the tendency of one group to dominate another. Bolt on some sort of legal framework (and keep the ability to allow excesses) to control stability mainly in favour of the dominant group(s).

So how might a communist society evolve. This has happened where there is hardship and a need for co-operation but seems to adapt over time to the selfishness of people and allow the dominance of favoured groups. Whether this is natural with humans or a necessary part of any sort of society capitalist or communist I am not sure. But the tendency exists and a ideal communist society must I suppose develop a form of legal framework that on the one hand preserves stability and on the other hand prevents domination and excess by any one group. This difficulty does not seem to have been resolved either in communism or in capitalism.

[MJW]

Imperialism and slavery predate capitalism by thousands of years so I'm not sure they are so much accidental features of capitalism as commonly occurring features of human history in general.

Of course, you could be using classic leftist special pleading where imperialism and slavery (and colonialism and many other things) under capitalism are magically different from the same under non-Capitalist systems. Bit like how the Soviet Union claimed its imperialism didn't count because it only counted when capitalists did it!

[Scurra]

I have often argued that Karl Marx wasn't a "Marxist" and that Adam Smith wasn't a "Capitalist".
They merely observed the world and drew some intelligent conclusions, many of which have then been taken out of context and distorted by others with their own particular axes to grind.

(Nice piece btw.)

[Al]

Hypocrisy is perhaps the only constant in politics.

[B.L. Zebub]

Speaking of Isaiah Berlin and his famous essay.

The link below leads to a review of that essay. Sadly, the name of the review's author isn't recorded.

Reading what the reviewer has to say about Berlin and his pamphlet, I had a sudden epiphany: characters like Egmont Kakarot-Handtke, very well-known by his colorful comments to blog posts, can claim an illustrious intellectual antecedent in history and philosophy.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1955/determinists-all.htm

[B.L. Zebub]

"very well-known FOR his colorful comments" Ooops!

[cjcjc]

Chris has become more demented over time, alas.
I seem to recall both slavery (the gulags) and imperialism were pretty core features of 20th century communism.

[Handy Mike]

Bit meta this.

'ANTI-COMMUNISM AS BAD FAITH' as bad faith.

Quite a lot of this blog is like this - grubbing around among empirical social science for corroboration of socialism or critique of capitalism.

But this post's a stinker. Every single one of those seven points is awfully thin, and some of them are just silly.